1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to employee management tools and in particular to a system configured to manage the work schedules of a plurality of employees.
2. Background
Historically, management and scheduling of a large employee workforce has been a complex and time consuming task. With regard to scheduling large groups of employees, it is difficult to predict the number of employees required to adequately staff a particular shift. Once the number of required employees is determined, employees must each be assigned a work schedule. Scheduling employees can be a complex task as many different factors constrain which employees may be selected for a particular shift. For example, scheduling limitations exist regarding hours worked per week, hours worked per day, or other factors. Further, some employees are available to work only certain days and/or certain hours. In addition, employees may wish to take vacation time, or to schedule changes or to ‘swap’ shifts with another employee to take vacation or for other reasons. Further, certain shifts may unexpectedly require additional employees to meet unexpected increases in workload, or conversely, certain shifts may require fewer employees than previously anticipated.
With regard to the management of large numbers of employees, several additional complexities surface. First, it is often difficult to determine which employees are working and which employees are absent, on break, or tardy. Second, keeping track of schedule violations in a reliable and recordable manner is difficult when large numbers of employees are involved.
While these types of difficulties are particularly burdensome when managing large numbers of employees, similar difficulties arise when scheduling smaller numbers of employees.
Several attempts have been made to overcome these types of problems however, these attempts do not fully overcome the disadvantages of the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,291, issued to Kepley, describes a scheduling system that communicates an agent's schedule directly to the agent at the agent's terminal, thereby preventing the need for manual distribution. The schedule is presented to the agents via video displays that are at each agent's actual work station, and thus are available for viewing by a particular agent only when that agent is seated at his or her workstation. Furthermore, the Kepley reference does not provide means to account for schedule changes. Absent these features, a system based on the teachings of Kepley still suffers from many of the disadvantages of the prior art.
Likewise, U.S. Pat. No. 5,289,368, issued to Jordan et al, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,325,292, issued to Crockett, both of which share a common specification, describe systems and methods used to help schedule employee work shifts. However, the methods and apparatus of these systems still possess several disadvantages of the prior art. Among others, system configured according to the teachings of these references still (1) lack an ability to schedule based on employee and not shift, (2) lack an ability to provide the schedules on an employee distributed basis and (3) lack the ability to conveniently and easily deal with schedule changes.
As described below, the present invention overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art by providing a new method and apparatus for employee scheduling, schedule changes and employee attendance monitoring.